Diet
Diet is important to mental and physical health, and it can be time consuming to try and figure these things out while being a student. So here’s a very brief overview for someone to get started: Food determines how big you are. If you consume more calories than you expend, you will get bigger. If you consume fewer calories than you expend, you will get smaller. If you meet your maintenance needs, you will stay the same. Regardless of your metabolism, body composition, genetics, or whatever, your body must obey the laws of physics and biological imperatives. Now, your calorie needs can change over time. But in the end, it really is calories in and calories out. Everything else is just fiddling around the edges of this basic fact. You can't get big if you don't eat big. That goes for muscle, fat, whatever. You can lift huge weights 10,000 times a day, and if you don't eat more calories than you expend, you won't gain a milligram of mass. Conversely, if you burn 10,000 calories a day and eat 11,000 calories a day, you will gain weight. Exercise and food selection plays a big role in what that extra weight becomes (fat or muscle), but the weight comes from food. With that out of the way, what should you eat? General dietary advice Before going into the nitty-gritty of calorie counting and so forth, you can improve your health a great deal by changing the staples of your diet and your patterns of eating. This sounds like a big deal, but is actually pretty simple and relatively painless. I'm not going to tell you to eat tree bark and fungus, for instance. That kind of extremist dieting is for morons. First, the obvious stuff: fast food and soda. Cut it out. Fast food is almost always extremely unhealthy, high in saturated fat and trans fat, very calorie-dense, and should thus be avoided by everyone. The occasional burger is harmless in the grand scheme of things, but if fast food is a staple of your diet, cut it out. Soda is the other thing that should be massively reduced by almost everyone. Soda is extremely calorie-dense, has no nutritional value, and for various reasons, you shouldn't be dumping massive amounts of simple sugars into your system. There is debate over if diet soda is neutral or still bad for you; my suggestion is to limit it, too. There are a lot of unsubstantiated negative myths about diet soda, and although it's still healthier than regular soda, it may keep you in a habit of preferring overly sweet food. It's still probably best not to drink diet soda. Drink water instead, with the occasional coffee or tea for variety. After a few months of this, your soda cravings will slowly dissipate. For those with a sweet tooth, all kinds of sweets are calorie monsters.- a pint might give you a few days’ worth of saturated fat and half the calories you should be taking in. You don't need to never eat something sweet again - that's ludicrous. Just eat it rarely and in smaller amounts. One other thing to be wary about when it comes to sweets, and sugar in general, is your spike in blood sugar after eating it. Diabetic or not, blood sugar is a big contributor to hunger. Long story short, when you eat sweets, you tend to want to eat more food, even if you're not hungry, which will obviously add to your calorie count. Finally, be aware that many "frappuchino" coffee beverages are made almost entirely of dairy fat and syrup, and can have absurd amounts of calories. Brewed tea and coffee are almost calorie-free, and a packet of sugar only adds about 20 calories, but some of these blended "coffee" drinks have on the order of 400 calories. Focus your meals on traditionally cooked food. Try to consume the least amount of processed junk you can and try to only eat whole, naturally occurring foods. Eating these will keep you fuller than the processed stuff and for less calories. There is a bunch of discussion about certain pieces of food being bad, and others good. As a rule of thumb, if it was part of a traditional diet, if you could make it by hand, it is good (eggs, butter, olive oil, oatmeal, fruit,), if not, it's not (margarine, soda, pizza, gummy bears …). Many people make the first steps towards weight loss just by cutting out soda and dropping the Big Mac content of their diet. Aside from being made of unhealthy ingredients, fast food and soda are so awful because they make it easy to ingest immense calories without being especially aware that you're doing it. I'm not telling you that you need to abandon everything you like forever. You just can't have obviously unhealthy foods be a main component of your diet. Having a reasonably-sized portion of something "unhealthy" that you really like 1-2 times a week is not a problem'' if the rest of your diet is in order''. But for too many people, unhealthy foods ''are ''their diet. Ketogenic Diet A more aggressive dietary change that someone can make in their life is selecting a specific type of fat burning diet if fat weight loss is a goal, a ketogenic diet is a scientifically proven diet with multiple benefits that can come with proper healthy weight loss. Often it is recommended to simply cut down on what would be considered fatty fast food, follow the above dietary changes and increase regimented work out seasons in regularity and forming more healthy life habits. This is something that a good amount of people can do and will do but some of us, don't really have the time to commit to a regular work out schedule and will look to compensate with a more aggressive dietary shift, and will often fall victim to a fad diet that could do more damage and have temporary results or no results. Results for most aggressive fad diets are temporary and dependent your continuation of the diet because it will cut down of water weight and nothing else. Without getting too much into the science of how the ketogenic diet and the bodily state known as ketosis works on this wiki, you can find more information of the science by clicking on the link here: https://www.ruled.me/ketosis-ketones-and-how-it-works/. But fundamentally the Ketogenic diet is doable by following three rules, cut carbs, cut sugar and increase fat. The first rule is common in many diets, cut out as much Carbs from your diet as possible from all forms of it, in keto a good rule of thumb is keep total carbs under about 30 grams a day, this can vary per individual. Keeping carb intake under 30-50 grams a day is the rule of thumb because carbs are found in almost all food in various forms and cannot be avoided in a healthy diet, these carbs I am talking about are found in fruits and vegetables and as a result some vegetables are too high in carbs for this diet, this is typically found in vegetables that are grown underground. The second rule is also a pretty common step in many diets, cut out as much sugar as possible form you diet, natural and added alike. This diet is bit more extreme then others in removing sugar from your diet because it means to cut out more than just added sugars, natural sugars need to be cut as well. The total amount of sugars you eat quantitatively would count towards your carbs, so this would mean your carb and sugar intake should sum to be less than about 50 grams a day. When looking out for natural sugars, they can be found frequently and avoided in most fruits and milks and the already mention high sugars found in sodas and most other flavored beverages. A good way to help your sweet tooth is to get most diet sodas or sugar free beverages such as sparking water or most diet soft drinks will fit this description and can help someone move through the keto diet when they may feel the urge for something sweet. The third rule is not common in other diets and may sound contradictory but increasing your daily fat intake is a key part in a healthy and nutritional keto diet. There is a balance that needs to be maintained because an increase in fat intake is essential to push the body into a proper nutritional ketosis, otherwise it would simply be a starvation ketosis and would result in negative side effects. This is also one of the bright spots in the ketosis diet, increasing that fat intake can make some foods more enjoyable, if you wondered what a food would taste like with butter, try it, it would actually be a good thing to try in this diet most of the time. Part of the diet that is also important to note, when you start the process to switch your diet your body will transition from running off of carbohydrates and sugars as its primary form of energy to burning fats and triglycerides as its primary form of energy. This transition is not very pleasant for most people and has earned the name keto flu. It will feel like your body is relapsing from a loss of its primary fuel source while it is also transitioning to its new fuel of burning fats. This period can vary between people for a variety of reasons and it can last anywhere between 1-10 days, on average the keto flue lasts about 2 days. Once you have progressed past this stage and maintain a balance keto diet you will most likely start to feel like your normal self again and will begin to see weight loss. Other typical side effects that come with keto after being a few weeks into the diet is more energy, better breathing and heart rates, sleep may come easier and be more consistent. All in all, the keto diet can be an extreme diet shift for people and may be costlier than a person’s original diet depending on their own circumstances but will almost always generate weight loss in the form of decrease in fat. The most difficult fact about the keto diet is that it is altering the internal state of your body and is continually dependent on your food intake and takes time to get back into that state when you fall out of ketosis, so there is no real way to have a cheat day without going through the timely process to get back into ketosis. This is why this diet would be a good alternative for someone aspiring to lose weight without having to devote consistent time to working out, but keto is still an excellent diet to pair with a consistent workout regimen for those who want to further increase their weight loss. However you choose to go about it, good luck with pursing a healthier diet and lifestyle!Category:Life Tips